


Vexing

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: ALL OF THIS IS RATED T, All spies are screwed up, Alternate Dimensions, Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Dimension Hopping Buffy, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I can't evn pretend otherwise, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Episode: s05e22 The Gift, Pregnancy, Secret Agent Buffy, Spies, Spy Buffy, Trauma, Unplanned Pregnancy, Violence, beware!, just saying, off screen character deaths, so much crack, spies in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:18:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Buffy jumps off a tower and somehow ends up being a CIA spy and having a torrid affair with James Freaking Bond. What even?





	Vexing

**Author's Note:**

> I have been unsuccessfully trying to cross James Bond with the Buffy verse for years and years. This is the first thing I ever even finished and it's absolute crack and I am not one bit sorry. NOT ONE BIT.

+

Vexing.

That’s the word Buffy picks for her situation, eventually. After the screaming, the crying, the bleeding and the despair that follows on the heels of the realization that she’s never going home. 

Vexing.

Sums it up pretty well.

She’s twenty years old, stranded in a world with no magic and thus no escape hatch, a bit left of center after literally _jumping to her death_ and coming out the other end alive. ‘The other end’ in this case being Wonderland, except see above for ‘no magic’. Not even pot smoking insects. 

Just her, and whatever she carried with her when she kissed her sister goodbye and leapt into the dawn. 

Which amounts to a set of keys that don’t fit anywhere anymore, twenty bucks, a knife strapped to her ankle and the clothes on her back. 

That’s roughly where the screaming, bleeding, despair part sets in, so things are blurry for a while but Buffy is nothing if not a survivor, so she pulls through this, too. 

Six months later she has a job, a one-bedroom cockroach-infested shithole of an apartment, roughly six-hundred dollars, five sets of clothes and at least seven knives. She subsists mostly on ramen and spends her days off from waitressing (again) in the public library, scouring it for any trace off the world she left behind.

Finds nothing.

Cries a little. 

Moves on. 

And on and on and on, soldiering on like a good little slayer, not happy, but surviving. It’s a bit like walking with a rock in her shoe, uncomfortable but survivable, a pain you get used to eventually. Either that, or you develop callouses, which amounts to the same thing. 

Like she said, ‘vexing’ sums it up pretty well. 

+

A year after her swan dive into obscurity and the life of a technically illegal alien, her neighbor, the only person she considers a friend, even if vaguely, disappears. Buffy has Anne flashbacks but goes looking anyway, finding the poor idiot all tied up and bruised because apparently, Clark isn’t very good at poker. Or at paying his debts. She makes a deal with the goons he pissed off, does a little something something for them – not sex, urgh – and assumes that’s it. 

Only two months later, one of the goons comes calling at her front door, this time with his boss in tow. 

Three years after her fall, Buffy Summers makes a decent living brokering information gained by a lot of seemingly impossible acrobatic feats, some sneaking and a bunch of plain-old smacking people around. She mentally thanks Willy for giving her so much practice, apologizes to Giles for using her powers for evil, or well, semi-immoral… stuff, and moves on. 

She’s twenty-four, her ID still won’t stand up to more than a cursory look and she trusts no-one because she knows no-one. 

“Vexing,” she repeats to herself for the hundredth time as she finds a good spot between cameras, takes a deep breath and a leap and lands on top of the six foot wall, on her tiptoes, to avoid the broken glass imbedded in the top. 

She freezes there for a moment, listens for an alarm that never comes and then drops into the park, sorry, garden, of the guy she’s robbing tonight. Judging by the quiet steps she can hear to her left, she has thirty seconds left to get out of sight and the lawn is flat and large. 

She takes a few running steps, picking up speed and then snaps into a series of cartwheels and backflips that gets her from A to B much faster than running and has the advantage of not _sounding_ like someone breaking in. People are trained to notice footfalls, not random little thumps in a large outdoor area.

Along the wall, up the drainpipe, through the second floor window that doesn’t latch right, and straight into the office.

New application for super senses: safe cracking. 

She has it open and the intel photographed in under three minutes, puts everything back the way it was and makes her exit the same way she came, down the pipe, across the lawn, onto the wall, down the other side and – 

“Don’t move!”

_Vexing._

+

She’s twenty-five, twenty-six, brokering information and occasionally giving her friend Baker from the CIA a call with some interesting information on drugs, a human trafficking ring, an agent gone rogue or just gone off grid. He pays her handsomely and her conscience gets a little vacation.

And, hey, being a CI for the CIA (see what she did there) apparently earns a girl legit paperwork, so really, Baker catching her with the list of undercover agents she stole from the guy with the shitty security turned out well for everyone. 

Except for Shitty Security Guy, because he got arrested by the local cops the next morning. Oh, well.

It’s a living. At least whenever he’s in the country long enough to need some intel from her and she manages to deliver before he swans off again to save the Western hemisphere. 

She gets a cleaner, bigger apartment, makes a semi-clean living in a library of all places, thank you, Giles, and goes out for drinks with her nerdy coworkers once a month.

In a certain slant of light, it even passes for a life. 

+

“What the hell, Baker?” she snaps, second knife in one hand, groceries forgotten in the other, as the man in question melts out of the shadows between her bedroom door and the living room window. 

“Summers,” he greets, hands in his pockets, a smirk on his face as he eyes first her and then the first knife she reached for. The one now embedded in the wall half an inch from his left ear. “Careful with that. Someone might get hurt.”

She throws the second knife to land on his right on principle alone and schlepps her groceries into the kitchen, where she starts unpacking, leaving him to either follow, or, you know, _leave_.

“I got nothing for you, in case this is work, and the door’s to your right, in case it’s a social call.” There. He’s a secret agent man. He’ll get the hint.

He chuckles from where he followed her and finally switches on a light, bathing them both in dull yellow. It makes his greying blond hair look wonky. She tells him so. He sticks his tongue out at her and she’s hit by a brief pang of homesickness. She often is around the agent. He looks like Giles and acts like Xander and it _hurts_ even though she’s been on her own for longer than she ever knew either of them, now. 

With a sigh, she asks, “What do you want, Chris? I have nothing new for you on that cartel thing, or I would have called.”

She’s broken into three known mob hideouts in the past week, working against the clock in trying to find a shipment of human cargo, of little boys and girls, and found nothing.

He leans against the counter and smiles, tiredly. “We got them. Earlier today. Another lead panned out. We got them.”

She slumps because she may not be the Warrior of Light she once was anymore, may not be the girl who could look down on Faith for accidentally killing a man, anymore, but she still tries to be… not bad. At least that. 

“Thanks for telling me,” she answers and then, gauging his expression, adds, “There’s more.”

He rolls his shoulders, a quiet yes. “I got a promotion out of it. Section Chief, actually.”

“Wow. Congrats!”

He nods, waves it away. 

“I’m moving. Most of my people are coming with me.”

Is it weird that it feels like he’s dumping her? Is it weird that she’s actually going to miss him? 

Before she can find a way to ask what that means for her, he goes on. “But I also get a certain leeway in creating a new team and, well, I’d like to bring you on.”

She blinks, parses that, and then laughs. “You want to what, drag your CI to wherever the hell you’re moving? Does the Company pay for that kind of thing?”

He rolls his eyes. “No, Summers, I want to bring a new agent along.”

Okay. There’s no parsing _that_. She gapes at him. Rubbing his forehead, it’s his turn to sigh. “Look. I’ve known you for years. This is not standard procedure, but we’re the CIA. ‘Standard’ doesn’t, generally speaking, get us a lot of results. You’re resourceful, you can run circles around most field agents when it comes to the physical stuff, and I know you’re clever.”

He seems to have actually thought about this. For a while.

“I don’t exist on paper,” she counters.

“Yes, you do.” Only for a few years and only thanks to him and they both know it. 

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Because you’re an asset I don’t want to lose. Because I’ve seen you throw yourself in the line of fire for people you didn’t know. Because you have flexible morals, but not flexible enough to go bad. Because you’re right, Company won’t let me take my CI along.” He pauses, adds, “Because, for some reason, I like your spastic ass and I can see that you’re stuck.”

In lieu of a sensible answer, she puts a tray of plain yoghurt into the fridge and says, “Didn’t they teach you not to start your sentences with ‘because’ at school?”

“Buffy,” he snaps, and it’s the second time he’s ever called her by her first name. The first was when they got caught in a tight spot together (one where the CIA never was and never acted within borders – naturally) and she almost died drawing fire away from him so he could get the job done and, you know, not die bloody. 

She turns to look at him, eyebrow raised. 

“Look, kid, I don’t know where the hell you come from, or where you learned the things you can do. I have no freaking idea why there is absolutely no trace of you anywhere, but I know you’re good people. I trust you. And I want you at my back.”

He picks up the bag of apples she bought and passes it over, followed by a jug of milk. “So how about it, we speed track you through Langley and then you help me catch bad guys for real.” He winks. “I’ll even let you keep your knives.”

She snags the box of tampons he’s wiggling from his hands and flings it onto the counter. “As if you could take them away from me.”

+

“Absurd,” she decides as she slings a single duffel with all her worldly possessions onto her dorm bed in freaking _Langley_ of all places, and mentally retires ‘vexing’ as being too weak a descriptor for this particular plot twist. 

Absurd it is, instead. 

At least for now. 

+

Elizabeth Summers graduates in record time and is immediately promoted into the field under Section Chief Baker and whatever little Buffy dreamed her life would be like, once upon a time, this wasn’t it. 

There were ice-skates and picket-fences, and then there was an early grave, there were loss and grief and _pain_ , there was loneliness and a dead-end job, a dead-end life without magic and home and family. 

All of that, she imagined. Falling between universes and becoming a CIA agent?

“My life is completely absurd,” she tells Chris over drinks after her first (official) mission and he laughs, toasts her and says, “Welcome to the world of spies.”

+

She’s thirty when locker room talk at work settles on that one guy from MI6, double-O section. 

“James Bond is a blood menace,” Javier snaps. “Someone ought to shoot the man and be done with it.”

“Heard they tried that already,” Cassidy counters as he swaps his suit for work-out gear. “Heard it didn’t even phase him. 007 is immortal, they say.”

And Buffy flees, half-dressed, to hide in an empty office until her sudden giggle fit turns into a crying jag and then both die off because she remembers James Bond. 

She used to marathon the movies with Dawn, rating the hotness of every new Bond as he appeared. Dawn was a Connery fan. Buffy was always partial to the later versions. Less charm, more edge.

And now, here, ten years after the fall, he’s _real_. 

She wonders if Mr. Fleming got a glimpse through the veil, if he somehow saw snippets of this world and turned them into books, or if he invented all of them, if this entire world if made up of his imagination. 

She wonders if, back home, Dawn will one day watch a James Bond movie that has a blonde CIA agent by the name of Summers in it. 

She wonders if it changes anything. 

+

Chicken or egg, chicken or egg. Did a man with a typewriter invent them all, or did they exist before him and Buffy just dropped in on accident. Does it matter? Does it help?

It’s stupid, but she can’t let it go, vexing and absurd as it is, she can’t just let go of the only link she’s found in over ten years.

So when Chris asks for volunteers to work with MI6 (Bond) on tracking down a dirty bomb headed for Miami, she raises her hand and ignores the way Javier elbows the newbie and mutters, “Bet she just wants to bang him.”

Well. She ignores him after she flips him off. 

Then she packs her bags and goes to meet the real life incarnation of her fictional childhood crush on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere. Just like in the movies. 

+

“Bond,” he introduces himself, “James Bond.”

His hand, as he shakes hers, is warm and his smile, as he flirts with her, is crooked. He’s shorter than she thought he’d be, stockier, harder. His hair is the wrong color and his eyes are a shade of blue she didn’t think possible in humans. His breath smells of alcohol before noon and there are lines on his face and scars on his hands. 

He looks at her like he’s already planning for her seduction and soon after, her death. He looks like a man used to losing and carrying on anyway, looks like Buffy when she was Anne, like Elizabeth when she was twenty and stranded, alone and lost. 

He looks like a human being as he leans around a corner and fires, taking down three men with three shots and not even pausing. 

Between them, they kill over a dozen men in less than a day, (Forgive me, Faith.) and afterwards, his hands aren’t shaking any more than her own. They eat supermarket food in a safehouse, wash it down with the cheap tequila he bought at a nearby liquor store and don’t talk until she asks, impulsively, “Do you ever wonder how the fuck you ended up here?”

There’s blood crusted down the left side of his face, still, and he smiles at her with teeth too straight to be real. Knocked out and replaced, maybe. Most of him seems to be. She shifts slightly, enough to feel the itch of the rapidly healing GSW on her left thigh.

“I make it a point not to,” he tells her, somehow managing to ooze charm and danger at the same time and Buffy, Buffy, Buffy has never been able to resist a pretty boy or a deadly weapon and Bond is both.

+

Afterwards, with Miami saved and the bomb back in the hands of the good(ish) guys, they part ways with a kiss and a grin and that’s it. 

She wonders, sometimes, if Tracey was real, or all the other girls from the movies. Wonders which one it was that broke the actual man, because she knows dead inside when she sees it, even if he hides it well. 

Almost as well as she does. 

Since those thoughts lead nowhere, she decides to toast him with a glass of scotch and gets back to work. 007 won’t get her home. 

He can’t even get himself home, anymore.

+

Just like ‘vexing’ made way for ‘absurd’, ‘absurd’ eventually makes way for a new word: ‘routine’. 

The same way slaying monsters and staking vampires, saving the world and dying a little inside was once normal, shooting to kill, fucking for information and running for her life becomes normal now. 

Chris gets caught up in a bad case, loses his position, gets demoted to a field office somewhere in Antarctica. Cassidy dies and is replaced by Naomi, who can drink all of the boys under the table and hates Buffy on sight. Javier loses seventy percent mobility in his left arm after a well-placed bullet and Buffy starts to wonder if she’s ever going to have a career that you can get out of alive.

It doesn’t look that way. 

She runs into James again in Teheran and they team up – against orders – to bring down a drug lord financing terrorists all over the place. 

Afterwards, there is bad food, cheap scotch and a roll in the sheets.

“Is this a tradition now?” she asks, face pressed against his chest, counting pock-mark scars with idle fingers. He trails a hand over her hair, shrugs. 

“Twice isn’t a tradition,” he counters and rolls out of bed to find a cigarette.

She doesn’t make a joke about smoking killing him and he doesn’t pretend to find it funny. Instead they curl back up together and she tells him about a mission she did last year, where the bad guy had an honest to god shark tank to throw people into. 

“Tarantula,” he counters, “put in my bed to kill me.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. I killed it with my shoe.”

She raises her head to gauge his sincerity, finds him smiling, inscrutable. “Okay. Weirdest ways people have tried to kill you, go.”

“Laser,” he answers, immediately.

“Organ,” she counters, thinking of a long ago church and a dead sister.

“Dropping a plane with me in it.”

“Hammer.” Well. Troll hammer. But. 

“Piranha.”

“Seriously?” He smirks again. She counters, “Chop sticks. Sharpened.”

Weirdest mission ever. 

He chuckles. “Sharks.”

“Now you’re just stealing my thunder.”

“Bathroom sink.”

+

They spend four days like that, her and him and their tall tales, ignoring the regular chiming of their phones in favor of… whatever the hell this is. 

+

“Totally a tradition now,” she tells him the third time, kissing him goodbye in a courtyard in Baghdad.

+

“Bond?” Felix Leiter asks, between drinks at the local Company hangout. Buffy tips her glass against his and nods. She feels like a borderline alcoholic, these days. It reminds her of giant snake gods, but more than that, it reminds her of bars like this one and the way James tastes after too much scotch. She thinks this might be that moving on thing everyone talks about. 

“Nice guy, for a complete madman,” he goes on. “Never seen him with the same girl twice, though. Not since – “

She shrugs. “It’s not really a thing, though. Just – “ she waves a hand. Naomi sneers at her. She has opinions about sex with male colleagues. 

Routine. That’s the word she’s missing.

It’s routine, just like everything else in her life. Thirty-four and she feels old down to her bones. 

+

Maybe that’s why she pins James down the next time, hands beside his head, legs tangled in the sheets, asking, “What the hell are we going here?”

“Existentially?” he drawls.

She lets go of one wrist long enough to smack him on the shoulder. “You and me. You’re the longest relationship I’ve ever had, and all we do is kill people together and occasionally screw. So what the hell are we doing, James?”

He wrestles one hand free and she lets him because he only uses it to tangle in her hair and pull her down for a kiss. Then he says, “We’re getting by.”

After that, he doesn’t really let her speak anymore. Not for a while. 

When he does give her a proper answer, he thinks she’s asleep. “You’re as close to normal as I’m ever likely to get,” he tells her and she keeps her eyes closed and her breathing even, despite the finger trailing down her bare spine. “There’s not enough left of me for more.”

_Idiot_ , she thinks, fondly. And, _me too._

+

She wakes up, one day, and realizes it doesn’t hurt anymore. 

The missing. 

The flashes of red hair out of the corner of her eyes, the sulking teenage-girls at the mall, the old men cleaning their glasses, the nerdy guys in Hawaiian shirts. 

It doesn’t hurt anymore. 

She meets up with James for a mission twice more.

After the second time she misses her period for three straight months in a row. 

+

 

+

 

+

The first time he meets Elizabeth Summers, she looks at him like she expects certain things from him and tells him to call her Buffy. 

He calls her sweetheart for the rest of the mission and determines to let her down fast and hard because he hasn’t let anyone look at him like that since V – since her. 

They always end up disappointed and then dead, or worse, he ends up actually trying to meet their expectations because they are beautiful and less damaged than he is and they think he’s worth more than the weight of the bullets in his gun. 

He’s not here to save them and the faster they learn that – 

But Buffy doesn’t need him to save her and after the third man he kills in front of her with nothing but his bare hands, the look of expectation is gone. She looks at him without her rose-tinted glasses, shrugs and buries a knife in the jugular of the thug sneaking up on them. 

He fucks her because it’s convenient and a warm body is a warm body and he wants to. It’s the first time in a long time he’s met anyone who _gets it_. The first, possibly, since Alec. 

And god knows, Alec doesn’t have half the legs Buffy does. 

She doesn’t need him to save her, does, in fact, save him a time or two, with impossible speed, accuracy and cold-blooded killer instinct. 

She’s breathtaking.

“You sound like you’re in love, Jamesy,” Alec teases, topping off his vodka and knocking it back in a single gulp. 

James flips him the bird. 

“Just letting off steam,” he corrects, because 006 understands that, at least. 

Love hasn’t had anything to do with it since Venice. 

+

She’s funny, is the thing. In that absurd, morbid way that his life often is.

Usually when villains drop into their own shark pools and get eaten, or people try to kill him with lasers and by dropping him out of planes, he’s the only one laughing, but she’s right there with him. 

“And then,” she drawls, eyes glued to her binoculars, watching their mark with a predator stillness, “he actually draws a knife on me and tells me he’s going to enjoy making me scream and I just – “ she stops to make a note of something happening in the manor across the way. 

He leans back in his chair, sips his coffee and watches the play of light in her hair, gold not brunette, wavy not straight. The same shade as his own, before he started going grey. 

“I just lost it. Pro tip, bad guys do not enjoy getting laughed at by tiny blondes.” She flashes him a wink. “It makes them cranky.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Mhm? Nah. Only stabbed him. A little bit. With his own knife.”

She grins, tongue behind her teeth and announces, “Head Honcho just went to bed with his mistress. Do I need to watch this?”

“No,” he decides, and puts down his cup to kiss her. 

+

She tries to tell him, once, that he’s her longest relationship and he cuts her off with damn good sex because she’s his, too, and he can’t bear that. Can’t bear the lost look in her eyes as she says it, can’t bear that he can’t bear it, because it means he’s getting too close.

She’s supposed to be a casual shag, the same as Alec, only slightly less regular, but, but, but. 

Sentiment, M would sneer, but M doesn’t know. Not about this. 

Regret is unprofessional, but see, here’s the problem. He doesn’t regret Buffy Summers.

+

Her file is a riddle in itself. 

Before the age of twenty, she doesn’t exist. 

Not in the usual intelligence agency way, but in an actual, factual, _simply wasn’t there_ way. 

It’s like she dropped from the sky. Afterwards, there are traces to follow, tracks to spot. Dead-end jobs and petty crime, a (un)lucky turn with a small racketeering outfit in the states. 

CI turned agent. Unusual, but he’s seen the killer instinct in her, has seen the way she goes cold and still and lethal and he gets what drove Section Chief Christoph Baker to keep her close and make her his. 

No family, no close friends, no relationships. Not even a bloody goldfish. 

“You’re becoming obsessed, mate,” Alec remarks from the bed, drawling, “Come back to bed, I have to be at HQ in five hours to ship out.”

When James gives up, slaps the file closed and meanders back over to Alec’s bed, the man leans close, drawls, “Tell me, would I enjoy her?”

It earns him a laugh. “She’d eat you for breakfast.”

+

He resigns himself to her, eventually. His life is absurd, the second most stable female figure in it is utterly vexing, the first regularly sends him out to die, and his best friend just drinks and howls with laughter when James tells him about it. 

It becomes routine. 

Right until his phone rings at MI6 right after he gets out of a debrief, Alec’s name flashing across the screen. 

“What?” he asks, trying not to walk like his ribs are broken, even though they are. Again. 

He hates it when people refuse to be taken down by a sniper rifle and insist on hand to hand. He’s not bloody twenty-five anymore. 

“Are you, by any chance, missing five foot nothing of blonde and pissy? Because if so, I’ve found her. She’s currently occupying our couch.”

“Do you want me to shoot you?” an unmistakable voice asks in the background. 

“Oh right. She also has a gun trained on me.”

“Which I am going to use. James, does this asshole have an off switch?”

Chuckling, and then grunting at the pain, James politely requests, “Tell me if you find it.” He sighs. “Will we need food for this?”

Alec apparently switched the phone around because Buffy becomes less tinny as she answers, “Definitely. And you’re going to need copious amounts of booze, too.”

“Fantastic.”

+

By the time he makes it home with curry and a lot of alcohol, the worst case scenario has happened: Alec and Buffy have made friends. 

He groans at the sight of them both lounging on the sofa, laughing over something and fights the temptation to just back out and run away because whatever brings Buffy to London – to this flat – can’t be good, and with Alec in the mix, it can only be worse. 

Still. Needs must. 

Stiff upper lip and all that. He fishes his friend’s favorite vodka out of one of the bags and flings it straight at his head. Alec catches it, reads the label and grins until James hooks a thumb at the other man’s room and orders, “Bugger off.”

Alec pouts, sneers and then goes. _After_ commandeering half the food. 

Buffy watches him go, amused. “Super spy roommates. Someone needs to turn that into a show. I’d watch it. Tell me, are there shenanigans?”

He drops the food in front of her, pops his own bottle of alcohol open and takes a long swig before offering it over. She shakes her head. 

“What brings you to my corner of the world?”

She shrugs, digging through the bags and coming up with some plain rice, digging into it with a plastic fork.

“Oh, you know. The usual. I’m defecting.”

“Pardon?”

There is a tiny sound of surprise from the back hallway, but since neither of them ever heard a door close after Alec left, and are thus fully aware he’s lurking, they just ignore it.

“Did you know that the CIA does not look favorable on female field agents having one in the oven?” Before he can react, she rattles right on, mutilating the rice with her fork as she goes. “My boss actually went so far as to suggest giving me the weekend off to get my abortion done so I could get back out in the field by Tuesday, please and thank you. Only then Naomi, the bitch, had to go ahead and speculate just who the baby daddy is and suddenly my cell-cluster peanut baby is ‘potentially useful’, because, you know, using children is something we do now and that’s when I upgraded from quitting right there and then to defection. Well, mild defection. I don’t really want to get assassinated.”

She pauses, draws a deep breath and adds, “Surprise, I’m pregnant, you’re the father.” The fork snaps in her hand, rice goes flying everywhere and James takes a long, long drink from his bottle. 

In the hallway, Alec gives up the pretense of not listening and offers a heartfelt, “Oh fuck.”

+

“Condoms, James, for fuck’s sake,” Alec chides half an hour later, for approximately the sixth time. 

Buffy finally gets fed up and throws a piece of her mangled fork at him. “Shut up. It’s not like I’m not on birth control and we used a rubber and I’m thirty-four goddamn years old and this should have been slightly less than impossible anyway. Now can we deal with it?”

She pauses. “Also, why are you here? You are not technically part of this discussion.”

They’re spies. They’re fantastic spies. The best MI6 currently has. They should be above awkward, telling silences. 

“Oh, heck,” Buffy breathes and James can tell, just from a glimpse, that Alec finds her tendency to mock-swear when she gets emotional adorable. Actually, Alec finds all of her adorable. 

To her credit, Buffy gets over it fast. “Okay. So not only am I knocked up by my casual hook-up slash sometimes lover slash colleague in all things spying and assassination, but his other casual hook-up slash colleague slash roommate is apparently a factor, too. My life is completely absurd.”

“Do you plan to keep it?” 

She starts, a hand flying to her belly and that’s answer enough, really, but she says it anyway. Says, “When I was sixteen, I was told I wouldn’t live to see eighteen, that I might make it to seventeen if I fought like hell.”

Stop-start and both men can tell that she’s not talking about a diagnosis, a disease, a medical issue. It’s in the dead look in their eyes, the one Alec left the orphanage with, the one James wore when he climbed out of Skyfall’s priest hole with no living relatives. 

“I never thought I’d have this and after – after everything I’ve done –“

“It’s something other than death,” Alec summarizes, because the bastard only ever gets insightful when no-one wants him to. 

That said, he wanders into the kitchen, presumably to find something non-alcoholic to drink for the pregnant woman in their living room. 

“You’re keeping it.”

Not a question. 

“Yes. You don’t have to be a part of it, but you deserve to know.” She sits up straighter. “I also hoped you’d get me in touch with a few people about that ‘defection’ thing.”

“You were serious?”

Alec returns, passes her a glass of water, sits back down between them, half shield, half hurdle. 

“This is the last straw. It hasn’t been the same since Chris was made to walk the plank and a lot of people don’t like that I slipped into my job sideways instead of going through the ‘proper channels’, whatever those are at a spy agency. We keep getting into bed with bad guys to take out worse guys and the lines keep getting blurrier. More or less ordering me to get an abortion was a push I’ve been needing.”

“MI6 isn’t necessarily better,” he cautions, for no reason he can fathom. “And they’re not going to let you go easily.”

“Running never works, anyway.”

“No. So what are you planning to do?”

“For now? Offer my services to MI6, preferably without committing treason and getting shot by my old friends. Find an apartment and read a lot of parenting books, I guess. Give you space to think about what you want out of this. If you want –“ she changes tracks. “Outside this room, no-one needs to know the sprog is yours. You can just be an old friend I called up for help.”

She stands, after that, grabs her jacket and handbag, and slips out the door without another word, leaving the two men alone with half-eaten curry and not enough alcohol. 

+

In the end, Alec is right. 

It’s something other than death. 

And no matter how absurd their lives are, none of them are too far gone to appreciate that. They both request a weekend of downtime and get it granted, post-haste, probably because Tanner is afraid they’ll change their minds, and spend the time moving Buffy into their never-used guest bedroom. 

Buffy and Alec flirt, James tries to find a way to phrase, “I screwed a foreign agent and came back with her and a baby in tow,” in a way that will not make M use him for target practice and all three of them laugh more than they have in a while. 

Later, Alec tries to be quiet sneaking into James’ room, which lasts until Buffy bangs on the wall and hollers, “I can hear you,” loud enough for the neighbors to complain. 

To shut her up, Alec stops whispering and it should probably be awkward, but all three of them are years beyond anything resembling shame, so the next morning ends up being a long, slightly disturbing conversations about sex on the job, honeypots and that thing James does with his tongue. 

Using years of experience and a gut feeling, 007 deducts that his best friend and his occasional hook-up are going to be shagging before the month is out. 

By Monday, Buffy has found a new doctor and taken off to wrangle an immediate appointment, promising ultra sound pictures, if they want them. Alec does. James swallows around a lump in his throat and adds a quiet, “Me, too.”

He still hasn’t figured out a way to avoid getting shot by his boss.

(There isn’t one.)

+

 

+

 

+

Buffy likes Alec. 

Where James has turned quiet to deal with the shit they live with, Alec has turned loud and even if his cheer is fake about sixty percent of the time, the remaining forty percent are real. 

He’s a maniac with a smile on his face and matches in his pocket and he reminds her of Faith in all the non-painful ways, only less confused. Less lost. 

He’s good for James, too, because he doesn’t let his friend brood quite so much. She likes the way they are together, too. 

The two of them, that is, not her and Alec. 

They’re comfortable and old and familiar and she didn’t think James knew how to have this, so she’s happy he does. And look at her, all emotional about someone else’s Good Thing.

She’ll blame it on the hormones, if anyone asks.

For now, she just plops onto the sofa between them, stealing the remote as she goes and flicking away from the news.

“No work, boys,” she chides. It’s mostly self-preservation, because watching BBC or CNN makes her want to go out and fix whatever shit is happening right now in the world and she can’t. 

Her bump is finally starting to show and she wants to enjoy this little bubble of normalcy a little longer. 

M demands to see her tomorrow, anyway, and then it’ll be peace over. 

“Dictator,” Alec chides, sneaking an arm around her shoulders to try and steal the remote back. When he fails, he leaves his arm there anyway.

“You’re not subtle,” she tells him. If Angel or Giles could see her now, they’d be mortified.

“He doesn’t know the meaning of the word,” her other bookend supplies, knocking their shoulders together. 

She makes them sit through a quiz show for the next hour and eats all their snacks.

+

It’s not perfect.

It’s not even in the vicinity of perfect.

M threatens to have Buffy shipped home and doesn’t back off for a full three days, miffed as hell. 

James can’t seem to make a decision on how much, if anything, he wants to do with his child, Buffy stares at their bar a lot and considers her drinking habits. 

The men track blood home, refuse to go to medical, pull suicidal stunts and leave Buffy alone for days and weeks to question what the hell she’s doing, having a baby, sitting at home, being useless. 

M gives her a desk job, smooths things over with the Americans and calls her a liaison, because it keeps her from getting shot and her vast network of informants available to Queen and Country. Tanner flirts and 007 almost strangles him for it, until he realizes what he’s doing. 

Then he backs off and crawls into a bottle for three days. 

Buffy tacks pictures of her doctor’s appointments up on the fridge, where neither man looks at them. 

Once, very late, Alec tells her about the time he pulled the body of a burned baby out of a collapsed building after a mission gone sideways. 

She keeps getting morning sickness at three am. 

There is a lot of screaming and a lot more silence, especially as the baby bump becomes impossible to ignore. 

They watch TV together and laugh at terrible jokes and pull apart all the plot holes in action movies. 

Buffy agonizes over baby names for three months. James has no opinion. Alec keeps offering up his own name like a prize while he seduces the cranky, pregnant woman into his bed.

The world keeps turning.

+

 

+

 

+

“My back is killing me,” Buffy announces, standing in the doorway to James’ bedroom, backlit and close to toppling, her center of gravity off by entire inches. Hers is not a graceful pregnancy, at least as far as James can tell. His experience is limited rather severely.

Alec rolls to make room and James raises the blankets and she shuffles between them like a rising mountain range before Alec shoves her sideways. Her knees end up too close to James’ bits for comfort, and Alec does something to her lower spine that has her groaning. 

“Have you decided to name the kid after me, yet?” he asks, chipper, despite the late (early) hour.

“It’s either that, or Mickey Mouse,” she promises, before her gaze meets James’. “Unless you’ve got an opinion?”

He knows what she wants from him, but he can’t. He won’t. He makes to turn over, but this time, the hundredth time, she catches him with a leg on his hip and a hand on his face. 

“Goddamn it,” she hisses, suddenly radiant with anger, or frustration, or both. Exhaustion, certainly. “I don’t need you to put a ring on it, you idiot, or to swear eternal love, or whatever you think I want. I just need you to tell me yes or no, because I’ve been here for four months and you still haven’t told me whether I’m introducing you as Daddy or Uncle James. Tell me to fuck off, if you want to, but tell me something.”

“Please don’t,” Alec chimes in.

“If you want to,” she repeats, with emphasis. 

He can’t. Won’t. Mustn’t. He’s seen it too often, with Vesper, with an office girl in Bolivia, with a dozen other, nameless, faceless women. (Lie. They all have her face.)

He’s seen it too often and he know that if he’d met her first, if he’d met Buffy before Vesper, things might have been different, because Buffy is hard where Vesper was soft, is determined enough to be cruel and worn enough to know all his tricks. But he didn’t. And he can’t risk – 

“Oh, you poor bastard,” she summarizes without him needing to say a single word, both her hands framing his face, thumbs pressing into his jaw, too hard. He has the best poker face at all of Six, but she reads him like a book. “You don’t think you deserve this.”

She leans closer, dragging Alec along, a kiss against his forehead, his cheek, his chin. “Secret time, Jamie. None of us do. Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

He nods, once, jerkily, and she lets him go, because she knows him well enough by now to give him this much space. 

Instead she snuggles back against Alec, who makes a smug noise, and, very quietly, says, “I think, if it’s a girl, I’d like to name her after my sister.”

“What was her name?” Alex asks, for once equally quiet and solemn.

“Dawn.”

James takes that for the gift it is. 

+

The next morning, over coffee in the kitchen, he asks, “Do we need a bigger flat, or are we shuffling sleeping arrangements around?”

+

 

+

 

+

Eve returns from Istanbul with shaking hands and unsure steps. 

“Does he,” she asks at the end of her debrief, corrects herself, “did he have any next of kin?”

“You don’t need to do that, Agent Moneypenny,” Tanner cautions, but he isn’t forbidding it, isn’t telling her no.

“I should,” she says. “I should. The body?”

He shakes his head. “We haven’t found it yet.”

She nods. Pauses, nods again. Her first field mission, her first mission with a double-O and instead of a success, instead of a bright spot in her file, she killed her own. She shot the agent everyone thought was immortal. 

Well, he’d never met Eve Moneypenny before, she thinks. Almost giggles. 

Shock.

“Who?”

Tanner shakes his head again. “006 was in the building when it happened. They already know.”

Right. They’re friends. They were. 

“I still need to, I have to – “

He actually rounds the table, puts a hand on her shoulder. “For now, you need to rest. You are grounded until further notice. I recommend staying away from 006 and Bond’s other next of kin. They are likely to kill you right now.”

His expression is somewhere between professional compassion and understanding for the impulse to murder her. 

She can’t meet his gaze. 

She shot Bond. 

She shot him dead. 

But she nods and does as she’s told, goes home, sleeps. Wakes herself screaming. Dresses and goes to the funeral a week later. 

There is no body. The river kept it. 

Across the grave, besides M, 006 stands arm in arm with a blonde woman, a crying toddler on her hip. The little girl has Bond’s blue eyes. 

Moneypenny feels like throwing up. 

+

006 is taken off the active duty roster a week later. News of the screaming match between him and M makes the rounds before noon. She forbade him from leaving because his country needs him. 

He told her to fuck herself. 

The blonde woman and the baby disappear with him. The three bedroom flat in 007’s name is sold before the month is out. 

+

 

+

 

+

It takes James a long time to come back to himself. 

Longer, still, to remember anything beyond pain and cold riptides. 

But eventually, he does. Eventually, something slips past the pain. Someone finds him a phone. The number dances in his head, too deeply ingrained to ever be forgotten, and in London, an unregistered, unmonitored phone rings. 

The gasp at the other end of the line is explosive. In the background, Dawn is screaming and Alec asks, haltingly, in Russian, “Is that-“

James breathes.

Then Buffy starts laying into him, starting with, “We thought you were dead,” and ending with, “Where are you, we’ll be there by tomorrow.”

He should say no. Should tell them to stay put, he’s coming to them, he’ll be home, soon, but _take the bloody shot_. 

He understands, suddenly, what Buffy meant when she said she had enough. The CIA tried to take her baby. MI6 did take his life. 

Too much. 

“Turkey,” he whispers, voice raspy. “Let me ask where exactly.”

+

 

+

 

+

Buffy Anne Summers turns thirty-seven on a beach in Spain, with her daughter baking her sand-cakes, her daughter’s father recuperating from being shot by his own people and falling off a goddamn bridge next to her, and both their casual lover sitting on her other side, mainlining tequila and critiquing their toddler’s baking skills.

They are ‘wanted for questioning’ by half a dozen spy agencies in the world, she hasn’t seen magic, or monsters of her home world in fourteen years, lives in a world that is considered fiction in her own, and nothing is as it should be.

“Absurd,” she tells them, apropos of nothing, licking her birthday ice-cream cone and watching Dawn attempt to feed James sand. 

“What’s that, dear?” Alec asks, a mellow grin on his face like there isn’t a gun hidden in his bag and half a bottle of forty proof in his bloodstream.

“My life. It used to be vexing, then it was absurd, then is was routine for a while and now we’re back at absurd.”

Helpfully, he offers her his bottle. 

James takes it before she can, takes a long swig to wash the sand from his lips from fake-eating fake cake. 

“Better an absurd life,” he counters, “than no life at all.”

He looks gloomy as he says it, gaze fixed on their daughter, hand twitching for a weapon. But hey, for James Bloody Bond that’s personal growth right there. 

“True,” she agrees, because she landed here after committing suicide to save an entire world and as far as afterlives go? This one isn’t half bad.

Absurdity aside, of course. 

+

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment at the door.


End file.
